Glass!

Looking good, huh? Much better than my last attempts at shooting glass bottles. This time, I did it “by the book” (you know, that book).

This one was somewhat harder than my last “subject”. I started off with this:

(Yeah, the shot is crappy and the framing even more so… ).

First, you need to get the framing right. And that means checking your background and your lighting so you don’t get any light spilled on the glass:

Next, you try to add highlights.  Good luck with that! You need a pretty big diffused light source for that. I didn’t have much room to place my lights (and I don’t have a softbox), so the image you see at the top is the best I could get. Here’s another attempt (in which you can also see the flash head in the reflection):

BTW, the illumination shown above is called “bright field illumination”, in which you have a bright background and you try to keep the edges of the glass dark. The opposite is dark field illumination, in which you shoot against a dark background and try to keep the edges of the glass bright. Like this:

Quite nice, even if I do say so myself.